


Growing Up

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 03:05:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13695573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Blair was raised to distrust the police





	Growing Up

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2018 Sentinel Bingo prompt 'perspective flip'

Growing Up

by Bluewolf

Blair learned when he was very young to distrust the police. His mother's thoughts on the subject were definite... and hostile.

"Never trust them," she said, over and over. "They're all jackbooted thugs, there to support the rich and their selfish way of life."

And when he saw several of his mother's friends arrested for taking part in perfectly reasonable protests against some of the more inconsiderate things the rich planned, things that even Blair, young though he was, could see would certainly damage the environment, well, that just confirmed Naomi's teaching.

It never occurred to him that the ones being arrested weren't just protesting - the way they went about it, they were actively resisting arrest as well as breaking the law.

***

Time passed. Blair managed to get himself arrested once (though he was released without charge) during a protest about felling old trees to clear ground for building a factory.

He had to admit that the police didn't treat him with the brutality he had seen some years previously - but then he didn't try to resist arrest, and from what he overheard, many of the police actually sympathized with the protest... but they had their job to do.

Yeah - upholding the rights of the rich, even if they didn't agree...

***

When he was sixteen, Blair went to Rainier, and for the first time, in one of his lectures, was presented with a different view of the police. Dr. Stoddard presented them as looking out for the welfare of everyone law-abiding. It made him think.

And then he found Burton's The Sentinels of Paraguay among some old books being sold at a car boot sale. It was only a few dollars, and he thought it could be something that would let him contrast the attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries towards tribal culture. And what he found was a discussion on tribal watchmen, their importance to their tribes, and the help they gave the tribal chief and shaman when, as occasionally happened, one of the tribe was accused by his fellows of a crime.

That, too, made him think.

***

As he got older and began working towards a PhD, Blair knew he needed to find a full sentinel he could study to help him ascertain his facts without relying on Burton. It had been all right leaning on Burton for his MA on historical sentinels, but if he wanted to do a dissertation on modern sentinels he needed to see at least one in action.

He searched.

He found a lot of people with heightened senses of taste and smell working for tea and coffee blenders or perfume manufacturers, several working as masseurs who had extra-sensitive touch, one or two with up to 20/15 vision, piano tuners with an acute sense of pitch and harmony... but nobody with all five senses heightened. Until a nurse he knew contacted him about a Cascade cop who had come in to the hospital complaining about his senses...

A cop.

But his need for info on sentinels took him to Cascade General and a meeting with Jim Ellison. And almost before he knew it, he found himself with a ninety-day ride along pass, officially to study the working of the police.

Although his main study was of Jim and how he used his senses, in keeping with the fiction of studying the police he asked several of them questions about their work, and was quite surprised to discover how dedicated most of them were to helping the general public. Not just the rich, the law-abiding public, and that they were quite happy to arrest a rich man who was breaking the law.

He knew he would never convince Naomi that the police weren't all brutal, jackbooted thugs... but he no longer believed that. Yes, there were probably some bad apples in the barrel... but most of them were honest, hardworking maintainers of the law.

And he would remember that.

 

 


End file.
